Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Israeli Court Rules: Useful Idiocy Not a Valid Legal Defense

Yesterday, the Haifa District Court rejected claims that Israel was at fault over the death of American Rachel Corrie.

Corrie, an ISM activist, was flattened and killed by an IDF armored bulldozer in 2003 while protesting Israel's right to defend itself of clearing terrorist minefields in the Gaza Strip near the Egyptian border.

Corrie's family accused Israel of intentionally and unlawfully killing their 23-year-old daughter, and launched a civil case after an IDF military investigation cleared the army's commanders and soldiers of wrong-doing.
YNET reports:

In a ruling read out to the court, Judge Oded Gershon called Corrie's death a "regrettable accident", but said the state was not responsible because the incident had occurred during what he termed a war-time situation.
At the time of her death, during a Palestinian uprising, Corrie was protesting against Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

"I reject the suit," the judge said. "There is no justification to demand the state pay any damages."
He added that the soldiers had done their utmost to keep people away from the site. "

She (Corrie) did not distance herself from the area, as any thinking person would have done.
He rejected a claim of negligence explaining that the bulldozer's driver had limited vision unlike Corrie. "She consciously put herself in harm's way," Gershon said. The accident had been self inflicted, he added. "

The judge found that Corrie was in a closed military zone. Further, he ruled that, based upon the evidence, the driver of the bulldozer, whom the plaintiffs had claimed intentionally or negligently killed Corrie, could not have seen the International Solidarity Movement volunteer before she was struck. Corrie could have saved herself, the judge found, if she had removed herself from the situation.
All claims of negligence against Israel in the death of Rachel Corrie have been dismissed. Corrie’s parents, the plaintiffs in the wrongful death case, will not be charged with court costs.

While my heart goes out to the Corrie family whose daughter was killed, it's tragic that the ISM used Rachel Corrie as a "Useful Idiot" in their war for the destruction of Israel. The Corrie family's anger and grief should be directed at the ISM which cynically used Corrie as a pawn against the IDF.

The Corrie family wrongly claims that was a plan to escalate the confrontation between the bulldozers and the "peace activists." Apparently, there was a plan, but not the way the Corrie's have been led to believe...

But it was the ISM members who decided to escalate, as described by Newsweek writer Joshua Hammer in a lengthy article in Mother Jones. Why? One possible reason was because of the sexual tension that was hurting their relations with the local Palestinians.

"An anonymous letter was circulating," Hammer reported, "which referred to Corrie and the other expatriate women in Rafah as 'nasty foreign bitches'
whom 'our Palestinian young men are following around.' That morning [of Corrie's death], the ISM team tried to devise a strategy to counteract the letter's effects.

'We all had a feeling that our role was too passive,' said one ISM member. 'We talked about how to engage the Israeli military.' That morning, team members made a number of proposals that seemed designed only to aggravate the problem. 'The idea was to more directly challenge the Israeli military dominance using our international status,' said the ISMer."

Back in July, Ha’aretz reported the story of a former Arab convict named Alladin who would find these young female peace activist staying in nearby villages, he would tell them he was on the run from the Shabak (Israel security), and ask them to hide him.

These young female dupes would of course be happy to help an Arab on the lam from the Israeli authorities and let him sleep in their rooms.
So far one girl initially came forward about the attempted rape against her. She was found wandering the village of Umm Salmuna (near Bethlehem) in a state of shock, so who knows if the attempt actually failed.

But in the end retracted her story due to pressure to “not hurt the cause”.
Pressure that came from the PA and the leftwing protest organizers.
Haaretz had learned that representatives of both the popular protest movement and the PA have since applied pressure on the American peace activist as to prevent her from making the story public.

The story could have ended there, except that there’s more.
Apparently, quite a number of female protesters have been sexually assaulted and molested by the Arabs they are protesting for.

If the Corrie family still needs an outlet to find meaning in their daughter's death, they should direct their pain at the ISM. They could even champion the cause for other concerned parents to educate their children about why the ISM is a dangerous and irresponsible organization.

...The transformation of Corrie’s life and death into a black-and-white
morality tale – featuring a well-off white American who was pure of
heart, poor little brown people who have no hope, and a Zionist entity
that is supremely evil – sums up the boneheadedness of modern-day
Palestinian solidarity. There was a time when supporting Palestine meant
looking upon Palestinians as a people capable of governing their own
lives, even of running their own state, free from the meddling or
bossing-about of outsiders. Now, Palestinian solidarity is all about
treating Palestinians as the ultimate victims, as helpless, hapless,
sad-eyed creatures who need decent Westerners, ideally well-educated
ones brought up in Amnesty-supporting households, to come over and
“save” them, in a not dissimilar way to how Bible-wielding white folk
once tried to saved the savages of Africa.

Palestinian solidarity has become creepily anthropological. It
increasingly treats Palestinians, not as a people who simply need more
political independence, but as a threatened tribe that must be protected
from further harm by “human shields” from the enlightened west. Decked
out in Arafat-style keffiyehs (a PC form of blacking up), and possessed
of a conviction that it falls to white-skinned, iPhone-armed westerners
to expose Israel’s “genocidal” crimes to the world media, solidarity
activists who travel to Palestinian territories are becoming more and
more like secular versions of the crusaders of old. They are effectively
going to Palestine to find themselves, to try to give meaning to their
potentially shallow lives through imagining that they can “save” an
entire people and halt a “genocide” by standing in front of a tank or
writing some blog posts about how tragic are the lives of cute
Palestinian children. It is a peculiar form of solidarity that reduces
an entire foreign people to the level of child-like victims who need the
likes of St Rachel to save them.

Avi: Its not a celebration. Its acknowledgement that the Haifa District Court issued a sane decision. Of course, the NIF-backed Supreme Court can over-rule, which is why we have a muqata in-house bet going. (I'm in for $10 that the Supremes will over-rule, unfortunately).

But in the end retracted her story due to pressure to “not hurt the cause”. Pressure that came from the PA and the leftwing protest organizers. Haaretz had learned that representatives of both the popular protest movement and the PA have since applied pressure on the American peace activist as to prevent her from making the story public.